We gathered for the first day of term, some new some vintage, and collected in the basket our words for the changing season, and seasonal recipes for our book. Apple and blackberry, crumble and pie, we longed for quince.
We went out to see how the land had changed. Stopping by an oak tree, we saw the floor full of oak galls, collected by Emily, keen to make Gall ink. On the underside of leaves, the spangal gall.
Back at base, remembering this was the season of mellow fruitfulness, we played the Human Fruit Machine, with much laughter.
Knopper Galls
The knopper gall wasp, Andricus quercuscalicis, inoculates embryonic acorn buds with her eggs. The oak responded in an entirely specific way to this wasp by producing growths known as knopper galls, from a German name for a type of helmet. (Guardian piece on their diversity). Arriving in the 1960’s they were first considered a threat to our great penduculate oak, but they’ve now have joined the rich community of life that inhabits the oaks. The wasp will pupate in the spring and wriggle out of vents in the galls. The emerging wasps, exclusively female, will fly off to find a Turkey oak, Quercus cerris, an evergreen introduced into Britain in 1735, to lay their eggs in its male catkins. This, by parthenogenesis, will begin a second, sexual generation of wasps (containing both sexes), which will lay their eggs in the native oak, Quercus robur, creating knoppers.
Kinda Elders in the woods 